The new Common
Development and Distribution License, or CDDL, is based on the
MPL (Mozilla
Public License1 .1). Although there are more than50 open-source licenses
currently approved by the OSI, Sun said in the proposed license's
executive summary that none of them was acceptable.

"We have carefully reviewed the existing OSI approved
licenses and found none of them to meet our needs, and thus have
reluctantly drafted a new open-source license based on the Mozilla
Public License, version1 .1."

In the proposal, Sun said that it worked hard to make the
CDDL as reusable as possible. "Additionally, we have attempted to
address the problems we perceived in existing open-source licenses that
led us to conclude that reusing those existing licenses was
impractical," the company said in the proposal.

Sun will presumably use the new license for its
long-promised release of an open-source Solaris, but company officials
have not spelled out what the CDDL would be used for. "We're not linking
this license to any product here at Sun," said Russ Castronovo, a Sun
spokesman.

In early November, Sun president Jonathan Schwartz
seemingly
contradicted what he and other
Sun
executives
have said about the lack of suitability of using the GNU General Public
License for Open Solaris. "We have not ruled out the GPL in the least,
and the odds are as good for such a license as for any other type of
license," Schwartz said at the time.

According to Claire Giordano, a member of Sun's CDDL team
and the person who submitted the new license to the OSI, the new license
won't be compatible with the GPL.

"Like the MPL, the CDDL is not expected to be compatible
with the GPL, since it contains requirements that are not in the GPL
(for example, the 'patent peace' provision in section6 ). Thus, it is
likely that files released under the CDDL will not be able to be
combined with files released under the GPL to create a larger program,"
Giordano said.

Some developers aren't happy with this move.

"It seems to me that the CDDL, as currently articulated by
Sun representatives, should be named the 'One Way Street' license," said
Jason Perlow, an integrator and developer.

"The fact that Sun has chosen various GPL technologies to
be integrated in Solaris, such as the GNOME desktop, but now seeks to
prevent [pertinent] technologies of Sun origin licensed under CDDL from
making their way into GPL-licensed systems and software projects, such
as GNU/Linux and the GNU tool set, would tend to dissuade the
open-source software community at large from participating in the
open-source Solaris project and related ports as a whole," Perlow said.

"If [Sun] proceeds in such a selfish fashion I would write
off any community-driven efforts on Sun's behalf completely," he added.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds shares some of Perlow's
concerns, but he doesn't think the license itself is the biggest issue.
"I think the real problem Sun faces is not the license details as much
as trying to build up enough of a community around the source base that
the license would matter," Torvalds told eWEEK.com.

"The problem Sun has in that regard is actually somewhat
visible in the license: They are not going to open-source everything,
and the reason I say that is 'visible in the license' is that the
license clearly allows linking with other proprietary code, something
Sun needs to be able to do itself," he said.

The decision not to open-source everything in the license
was likely the result of a combination of issues, Torvalds said. It's
"partly Sun wanting to maintain control, and partly … Sun not being even
legally able to release those parts of Solaris that they don't have full
ownership on."

As a result, Torvalds said, it will be tough for Sun to
find support in the open-source software community. "The community that
Sun must be hoping to gather round Solaris will likely always play
second fiddle to Sun itself. … They'll have a very hard time getting any
real community."

He contrasted Sun's CDDL with the wide-open nature of the
GPL. "One of the beauties of the GPL," he said, is that "you have to
totally give up control over the project (because everybody literally
has the same rights to the whole project), but exactly because nobody
can control it, it makes everybody feel like true owners."